Climate change will exacerbate many of the political, social, and economic forces that generate conflict and insecurity – with enormous consequences for humanity.
6+1 Questions about States and Nature
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Recent Posts
Writing Wednesday: embracing criticism for book revisions
Many a postdoc are likely in my position this year, dissertation defense safely in the review mirror and settling into the groove of their research. Those who, like me, are fortunately enough to...
Congress, Trump, and Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy
This post comes from Bridging the Gap co-director Jordan Tama, Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. American presidents have typically been more...
What the UAE’s detention of a UK graduate student means for Middle East studies
I feel like I should say something about the disappearance—and likely assassination—of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This tragedy was enabled by America’s permissive stance towards Saudi Crown...
More Recent Posts
What Foreign Policy Did Right. (And Other Stuff.)
In lieu of friday nerd blogging last week (which I saw Vikash had covered) Rob Farley and I blogged heads about gender in Foreign Policy, gender and race in Game of Thrones, and popular culture in foreign affairs. [Warning: There are some mild and at least one not-so-mild TV and book spoilers in...
Why don’t Korea and Japan Align, even though IR says they should?
For awhile I was collecting links and such to make an argument about Korea and Japan working together on big issues like China and NK, or finally clinching the much-discussed but little worked-on FTA. Both the realist and the liberal in me wanted to see two liberal democracies working together in...
Ambiguity of “Decision”
This post started off as a reply to a comment under Robert Kelly's post on historical institutionalism, but it got so long I thought it deserved its own post.There is a great deal of ambiguity in how we use the term "decision" in contemporary IR, an ambiguity that also infects the closely related...
A Dothraki Complaint
Drogo as angry brown man.Source: dothraki.orgGraddakh! We the brown people of Vaes Dothrak collectively curse the producers of HBO and the slanderous "creator" of our world, which you call the Game of Thrones. We know that your people have a long standing tradition of questionable and...
What’s So ‘Institutional’ @ Historical Institutionalism?
NOTE: The following was actually written before Dan Nexon posted a good piece on exactly the same essay. I’m not sure if that coincidence means anything, but here’s my take: ----------------------------------------- So I just read Orfeo Fioretos’ “Historical Institutionalism in International...
Institutionalizing Atrocity Prevention
I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics, but President Obama's speech this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum (see Charli's post below) and today's first meeting of the atrocity prevention board at the White House is a positive development. For the past twenty years -- since the beginning of...
‘Bleg’: How Long are your ‘Revise & Resubmit’ Letters to the Editor?
I have been asked to revise and resubmit an article submitted for an IR journal. But it’s a big r&r; the editor even said it would be “a great deal of work” (groan). While I must make the changes to the ms, I must also submit a letter to the editors and reviewers to explain my changes. That’s...
Two certification systems
The keynote address for this year's NITLE Symposium was delivered by Dan Cohen, a major voice in the "digital humanities" movement and one of the leading figures behind Zotero, the open-source free EndNote killer research tool. Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I...
Interstellar Relations: A New Old Course At Georgetown
This is a shameless bleg to two different audiences.The first, and immediately more important, is undergraduate students who might like to take a serious course about international relations, political science, and science fiction this summer. During the first summer term, I'm picking up Dan's...
Why N Korea Gets Away with its Stunts: a Response to Jennifer Lind
Jennifer Lind has a good piece up on Foreign Affairs this week on why NK seems to regularly get away with with hijinks like last week’s rocket test (which directly contravenes UN Resolution 1874). She notes, correctly, that NK has been pulling unanswered, wild stunts like this for years –...
Winecoff vs. Nexon Cage Match!
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market...
All Politics is Local, Korean style
<img src="https://lh3.ggpht.com/-lXf905vas9I/T4Zfu5yVCwI/AAAAAAAAAJg/Cgr7ZRk41Cg/videoefa933ead93d%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv =...